SINGAPORE – Between 2022 and 2025, a woman placed food orders totalling more than $9,000 at two restaurants by using fake PayNow screenshots.
Filipino Santos-Tumalip Maria Monalyn Bagaporo, 33, was sentenced to one year and 11 months’ jail on Nov 13 after she pleaded guilty to four charges, including cheating and theft.
Another three charges were taken into consideration for sentencing.
Court documents showed that Bagaporo first started ordering food from House of Seafood restaurant, located in Joo Chiat, in May 2022.
She would place her order directly on the restaurant’s website and select PayNow as the payment method.
Instead of transferring the money to the restaurant’s bank account, Bagaporo would transfer the exact amount of money to herself.
She would then take a screenshot of the transaction and use a photo editing app to edit the screenshot to reflect that the money had been sent to the restaurant for the order.
In some of the screenshots, she even edited the details of the sender account so it would appear as if she was making payments from different accounts.
The restaurant manager would review the screenshots to confirm that the payment amount and transfer date matched the order, but did not cross-check the restaurant’s bank records to verify if the payment had been received.
Bagaporo did this 35 times between May 2022 and August 2023, and cheated the restaurant of $3,891.75.
